


And the Deep Blue Sea

by Anythingtoasted



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble, Episode 3, F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:11:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4715696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anythingtoasted/pseuds/Anythingtoasted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another drabble, this time a rumination on the kiss scene. Set directly after/during the scene after the swimming pool, Max's POV. Max/Chloe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Deep Blue Sea

  
She wakes enveloped by Chloe's arms, eyes too heavy to open. For a moment she is submerged, a red world beneath her eyelids, the sounds outside too muted to follow. Just one a soft, steady rhythm, Chloe's breath at her ear, and the throb of her arm twinning it, a little numb from being curled around Chloe's body all night. They stink of the night air, something fresh and dirtlike and nameless, more sensation than smell alone; and chlorine, like formaldehyde, hangs suspended in the air around them, sharp and acrid on her nose when she breathes in.

Chloe doesn't smell the same, of course; for all intents and purposes she might be a different girl to the one Max used to know. Her hands bite, her fingertips are yellowed. She clings to Max's back when they hold each other; when they part, she always looks lost.

Max shuffles in her arms, Chloe close and so, so warm at her back.

Outside, Arcadia bay is waking, and Max is underwater, already in the sea. Chloe called her into the water the night before, wild-eyed and dangerous and sharp; but now she's the bow of a ship, gently rocking. She huffs longer breaths, snores a little. Max wonders if she's really dozing, or if they're both pretending, extending the moment, protected by the innocence of sleep. Chloe's hand drifts over her stomach, skirts around the indent of her waist, and settles.

Max, suddenly overwhelmed again by sleep, settles too.

The next time she wakes it's much brighter - the house is living again, Joyce skirting around downstairs. She flushes hotly, wondering if Chloe's mother knows she's here. It's not like when they were kids, staying up all night talking shit, telling stories. If she wanders downstairs now she'll feel like somebody's lover, open the door and slip into the sunshine alone, and the thought makes her want to sink deeper into the mattress. If only she could stop time, instead; slide out, silent, indent in the bed her only remainder.

She shifts after a while, makes a grab for her camera to preserve the moment. Chloe, true to form, has no respect for preservation.

The talking feels stilted, and her breath seems to stick in her throat like blood. In the past few hours most of Chloe's bullshit seems to have fallen away - as if she was ever fooling anyone in the first place. But its sad, and it's vulnerable; the words on her walls, the relics scattered around, artifacts from better days. Max crawls out of the bed and sees a dozen things she recognises - old drawings, littered with roach-ends; bus tickets, photographs, entry-bands from concerts they went to when they were kids. It's like Chloe has nothing new, and the fact of it scares her, almost as much as it flatters and thrills her too. In Rachel's clothes, Chloe's eyes track her anew; hungry, ashamed.

She can't stop feeling that magic from the night before. If Chloe had asked her to skip town right then - pile in the truck and just drive - she thinks she probably would have done it. Instead, she kisses Chloe in the morning, and the air thickens around them, dulling all her senses beyond touch.

She wants to take it back; she wants immediately to do it again. She wants to go all the way back to the night before, where under cover of darkness everything was easier; she wants to kiss her and kiss her and kiss her until she can't breathe through it anymore.

Walking downstairs she is sluicing through water again. It rolls off her shoulders in waves, breaking behind her with barely a shiver; out of the room, back to the real world. Joyce is in the kitchen, humming; light through the windows is cut in shafts, solid blocks of yellow.

The smells and sounds hit her; she has broken the surface, all at once. Helping Joyce make breakfast, she could be ten again, but she is not. The girl upstairs drifts in her sinuses, roves behind her eyes. Stink of chemicals and bright blue light; the way she'd beckoned Max to the water, and made her so willing to drown.


End file.
